Persistence of the uncanny valley: the influence of repeated interactions and a robot's attitude on its perception

Zlotowski J, Sumioka H, Nishio S, Glas DF, Bartneck C, Ishiguro H. Persistence of the uncanny valley: the influence of repeated interactions and a robot's attitude on its perception. Frontiers in Psychology. 2015;6:883

Comparison of Robots' and Embodied Conversational Agents' Impact on Users' Performance

Robots and Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) are two technologies that strive to make computers more accessible for their users by incorporating physical body. Both have been widely used in different domains, such as education or entertainment. However, relatively little attention has been paid to specific qualities of these technologies. The primary focus of this paper is on comparison of robots’ and ECAs’ impact on users’ task performance. An experiment with 16 participants was conducted in between-subjects design. Subjects were asked to solve mathematical problems on a computer. Moreover, each participant was interacting with either a small robot-rabbit or its computer agent version, which provided them with feedback on their task performance. The data from a post-test questionnaire regarding the interaction and the task performance was analyzed using Mann-Whitney U test, and independent and dependent samples t-tests. The results show that both the robot and the ECA helped participants to focus on the task and the amount of time required to solve a problem decreased during the course of the experiment. Moreover, it took participants more time to solve a problem in the robot’s than the agent’s condition, but participants were more forgiving for the robot’s than the ECA’s repetitive feedback. Furthermore, the robot and the agent were liked, and the interaction with them was rated as entertaining and fun. These findings have important implications for a choice between these 2 technologies as educational and entertainment tools. Asiasanat:robot, embodied conversational agent, human-robot interaction, social robo

Understanding Anthropomorphism in the Interaction Between Users and Robots

Anthropomorphism is a common phenomenon when people attribute human characteristics to non-human objects. It plays an important role in acceptance of robots in natural human environments. Various studies in the field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) show that there are various factors that can affect the extent to which a robot is anthropomorphized. However, our knowledge of this phenomenon is segmented, as there is a lack of a coherent model of anthropomorphism that could consistently explain these findings. A robot should be able to adjust its level of anthropomorphism to a level that can optimize its task performance. In order to do that, robotic system designers must know which characteristics affect the perception of robots' anthropomorphism. Currently, existing models of anthropomorphism emphasize the importance of the context and perceiver in this phenomenon, but provide little guidelines regarding the factors of a perceived object that are affecting it. The proposed reverse process to anthropomorphization is known as dehumanization. In the recent years research in social psychology has found which characteristics are deprived from people who are perceived as subhumans or are objectified. Furthermore, the process of dehumanization is two dimensional rather than unidimensional. This thesis discusses a model of anthropomorphism that uses characteristics from both dimensions of dehumanization and those relating to robots' physical appearance to affect the anthropomorphism of a robot. Furthermore, involvement of implicit and explicit processes in anthropomorphization are discussed. In this thesis I present five empirical studies that were conducted to explore anthropomorphism in HRI. Chapter 3 discusses development and validation of a cognitive measurement of humanlikeness using the magnitude of the inversion effect. Although robot stimuli were processed more similarly to human stimuli rather than objects and induced the inversion effect, the results suggest that this measure has limited potential for measuring humanlikeness due to the low variance that it can explain. The second experiment, presented in Chapter 4 explored the involvement of Type I and Type II processing in anthropomorphism. The main findings of this study suggest that anthropomorphism is not a result of a dual-process and self-reports have a potential to be suitable measurement tools of anthropomorphism. Chapter 5 presents the first empirical work on the dimensionality of anthropomorphism. Only perceived emotionality of a robot, but not its perceived intelligence, affects its anthropomorphization. This finding is further supported by a follow up experiment, presented in Chapter 6, that shows that Human Uniqueness dimension is less relevant for a robot's anthropomorphiazability than Human Nature (HN) dimension. Intentionality of a robot did not result in its higher anthropomorphizability. Furthermore, this experiment showed that humanlike appearance of a robot is not linearly related with its anthropomorphism during HRI. The lack of linear relationship between humanlike appearance and attribution of HN traits to a robot during HRI is further supported by the study described in Chapter 7. This last experiment shows also that another factor of HN, sociability, affects the extent to which a robot is anthropomorphized and therefore the relevance of HN dimension in the process of anthropomorphization. This thesis elaborates on the process of anthropomorphism as an important factor affecting HRI. Without fully understanding the process itself and what factors make robots to be anthropomorphized it is hard to measure the impact of anthropomorphism on HRI. It is hoped that understanding anthropomorphism in HRI will make it possible to design interactions in a way that optimizes the benefits of that phenomenon for an interaction

Dual-process of anthropomoprhism

<p>Data from a study on dual-process of anthropomoprhism in Human-Robot Interaction</p

The Interactive Effect of Robot Anthropomorphism and Ability on Perceived Threat of Robots and Support for Robotics

<p>This dataset was used analyzed in paper "The Interactive Effect of Robot Anthropomorphism and Ability on Perceived Threat of Robots and Support for Robotics".</p

Computational model of anthropomorphism for human-robot interaction

Zlotowski J. Computational model of anthropomorphism for human-robot interaction. In: Kuzuoka H, ed. Proceedings of the 8th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2013), Young Pioneers Workshop. Piscataway, NJ: IEEE Press; 2013: 76-77

Navigating in public space: participants’ evaluation of a robot’s approach behavior

Zlotowski J, Weiss A, Tscheligi M. Navigating in public space: participants’ evaluation of a robot’s approach behavior. In: Proceedings of the 7th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI2012). IEEE Press; 2012: 283-284

The inversion effect in HRI: are robots perceived more like humans or objects?

Zlotowski J, Bartneck C. The inversion effect in HRI: are robots perceived more like humans or objects? In: Kuzuoka H, ed. Proceedings of the 8th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2013). Piscataway, NJ: IEEE Press; 2013: 365-372

Can we control it? Autonomous robots threaten human identity, uniqueness, safety, and resources

Zlotowski J, Yogeeswaran K, Bartneck C. Can we control it? Autonomous robots threaten human identity, uniqueness, safety, and resources. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies. In Press;100:48-54

Persistence of the Uncanny Valley: the Influence of Repeated Interactions and a Robot&#39;s Attitude on Its Perception

The uncanny valley theory proposed by Mori has been heavily investigated in the recent years by researchers from various fields. However, the videos and images used in these studies did not permit any human interaction with the uncanny objects. Therefore, in the field of human-robot interaction it is still unclear what, if any, impact an uncanny-looking robot will have in the context of an interaction. In this paper we describe an exploratory empirical study using a live interaction paradigm that involved repeated interactions with robots that differed in embodiment and their attitude towards a human. We found that both investigated components of the uncanniness (likeability and eeriness) can be affected by an interaction with a robot. Likeability of a robot was mainly affected by its attitude and this effect was especially prominent for a machine-like robot. On the other hand, merely repeating interactions was sufficient to reduce eeriness irrespective of a robot's embodiment. As a result we urge other researchers to investigate Mori's theory in studies that involve actual human-robot interaction in order to fully understand the changing nature of this phenomenon